hardinparamedic:orbister: I had a research job as part of which I had to make up an etching solution including HF - it's about the only thing which will etch niobium. I used it cheerfully and with no special precautions until the day I had some spare time and read the safety data sheet.

You're absolutely lucky that you didn't get exposed to it. A concentrated solution of HF can be fatal with exposure sites the size of a penny. It's not the burn that kills you, it's the fact that Fluoride Ions will seek out any calcium it can. Hypocalcemia is not a pleasant death.

orbister:Oh yes indeed. Know what the standard treatment for a major HF burn is? If it gets to the bone you get immediate amputation at the next major joint.

Who told you that?

They mix calcium gluconate in a KY slurry at a ratio of 1ml CaGlu to 2ml KY and slather that on the wound every fifteen minutes. Hands get put in gloves filled with the stuff. They'll infiltrate Ca Gluconate into the tissue around the burn too with a tuberculin syringe at a dose of 0.5ml x cm3 area affected. When you get to the hospital, an anesthesiologist will put in an arterial line above the level of the injury and give you a massive dose of calcium gluconate intraarterially for the next few hours.

Amos Quito:hardinparamedic: orbister: I had a research job as part of which I had to make up an etching solution including HF - it's about the only thing which will etch niobium. I used it cheerfully and with no special precautions until the day I had some spare time and read the safety data sheet.

You're absolutely lucky that you didn't get exposed to it. A concentrated solution of HF can be fatal with exposure sites the size of a penny. It's not the burn that kills you, it's the fact that Fluoride Ions will seek out any calcium it can. Hypocalcemia is not a pleasant death.

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Sodium Flouride is found in Toothpaste. Hydrofluoric Acid is not Sodium Fluoride.

hardinparamedic:Amos Quito: hardinparamedic: orbister: I had a research job as part of which I had to make up an etching solution including HF - it's about the only thing which will etch niobium. I used it cheerfully and with no special precautions until the day I had some spare time and read the safety data sheet.

You're absolutely lucky that you didn't get exposed to it. A concentrated solution of HF can be fatal with exposure sites the size of a penny. It's not the burn that kills you, it's the fact that Fluoride Ions will seek out any calcium it can. Hypocalcemia is not a pleasant death.

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Sodium Flouride is found in Toothpaste. Hydrofluoric Acid is not Sodium Fluoride.

hardinparamedic:They mix calcium gluconate in a KY slurry at a ratio of 1ml CaGlu to 2ml KY and slather that on the wound every fifteen minutes. Hands get put in gloves filled with the stuff. They'll infiltrate Ca Gluconate into the tissue around the burn too with a tuberculin syringe at a dose of 0.5ml x cm3 area affected. When you get to the hospital, an anesthesiologist will put in an arterial line above the level of the injury and give you a massive dose of calcium gluconate intraarterially for the next few hours.

That sounds the flesh wound version

I've never heard you get immediate amputation.

Once it's in the bone nothing stops it except lack of bone. Well, that's what they told us. We had the gluconate paste handy for small splashes - luckily I never had to use it.

skozlaw:Ivo Shandor: Fun bit of trivia: many of those "canned air" dusters are the same R-134a chemical that's used as a refrigerant. If it's inside an air conditioner you're supposed to carefully recover and recycle it. If it's in a duster can, spray away!

R-134a is not dangerous unless it's compressed in which case it can freeze your skin. Aside from it displacing oxygen, there is no reason it wouldn't be safe coming out of a duster.

Suddenly popping a high pressure cap off and getting sprayed with the still-liquified coolant = badSpraying yourself with a gentle mist from a duster = no problem

/ You also have to turn the canister upside down to extract it from the can.

Yeah and the chemicals do a fun seperation in liquid form.Ill stick with my stockpile of r12 and enjoy the intense cooling power it provides over 134.

Was visiting a BASF plastics plant in Baton Rouge a few years ago. Got to the plant and wasn't allowed in to see my contact there. They had a phosgene leak from a failure of a canned motor pump an hour or so before.

Step 1. Push through your industrial refrigerant with craptons of lobbying, knowing full well it's uselessly dangerous to consumers but hiding the fact anyway. Step 2. Profit. Step 3. Pay for public outcry stories to stick it to the agency that otherwise gets in the way of your profits. Step 4. More profit + head of EPA next time there's a Republican president.

maxalt:thenumber5: maxalt: I worked at a company Statec in so cal in the 1980's for about 1 year. Statek used Hydrogen Fluoride to etch quartz crystal in the manufacture of oscillators for watches computers and all kinds of high tech stuff. Hydrogen Fluoride is just about the only acid that will do the job. I got one drop on the back of my hand. The acid doesn't react as much with skin as it does with bones, I had an open wound on my hand for ≈ nine months and the back of my hand looked as bad as the picks in the article. I only took the job as a friend to help get the company going with some equipment he and I designed. The companies name Statec stands for Stout Technology. Jergan Stout revolutionized the watch industry in the 1960 by inventing the led watch that kept time with an oscillator. That stuff is just about the worst crap in the world, some one is getting paid off to approve using HF.

tricycleracer:The two companies' success in winning domestic approval for their patented chemical came at just the right time, since DuPont's patents on R-123a, the refrigerant which had previously been the industry standard, were about to expire.

Sounds legit.

Wonder about that.. used to have R12 as automotive refrigerant.. replaced with R134a.. Window AC,s went from R12 & R22 to R134a,, residential was R12, R500, R22... replaced by R410, also known as Puron (Carrier )... R123 is a replacement for R11 in chillers...

Yeah in addition to being poisonous its also corrosive, an oxidiser, reacts with water, and is radioactive.I wouldnt touch the stuff with a 39&1/2 foot pole.

One of the more fun things about first processing or reprocessing nuclear fuel (UREX / PUREX reprocessing) is that it involves a lot of the stuff, and there's not a lot you can do with it afterwards. In non-nuclear applications you can run it through a plasma torch and reduce it to more benign compounds, but with reprocessing waste it's invariably contaminated with radiologically "hot" stuff that you still have to deal with.

So you basically have this "aqua regia" that all you can do is store. At the Hanford Site they have millions of gallons of the stuff in big underground tanks, and we spend billions every year just keeping it from seeping into the Columbia river.

Anytime someone goes on about "closed cycle" reprocessing of nuclear waste, they probably just think you can shovel fuel rods from one reactor to another and magic happens.

"The ability to surpass the oxidizing ability of oxygen leads to extreme corrosivity against oxide-containing materials often thought as incombustible. Chlorine trifluoride and gases like it have been reported to ignite sand, asbestos, and other highly fire-retardant materials" [...] " It ignites glass on contact [...] " It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water - with which it reacts explosively."

"The ability to surpass the oxidizing ability of oxygen leads to extreme corrosivity against oxide-containing materials often thought as incombustible. Chlorine trifluoride and gases like it have been reported to ignite sand, asbestos, and other highly fire-retardant materials" [...] " It ignites glass on contact [...] " It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water - with which it reacts explosively."

/Better living through chemistry

How do you surpass the oxidizing ability of oxygen? Thats like dividing by zero.

maxheck: Anytime someone goes on about "closed cycle" reprocessing of nuclear waste, they probably just think you can shovel fuel rods from one reactor to another and magic happens.

You can do that with a sufficiently advanced reactor design. You can even mix in some depleted uranium if you want.

I'm not going to say that we couldn't do something like that at some point, but you gave me blog posts for a technology that hasn't produced in 30 years. The US has been trying to close the cycle for 60+ years, heck, the French made it a national priority and threw their entire energy industry at it 40 years ago and they *still* send the useful stuff to the Japanese and ship the waste to Russia to deal with in classic Russian fashion (dump it in a hole in Siberia.) Even they are looking at making their own "Yucca Mountain" style waste dump with not much more success than the US had.

Currently working technologies create a crapton of mid-level chemical waste for every pound of recovered fuel. That sort of gets glossed over sometimes because people focus on the spent fuel.

More DuPont bullshiat. A propane-butane mix is less toxic, more effective as a refrigerant, and greener than any of this crap. Yes, there is a chance of a fireball, but this fireball would be a short poof more than a boom, and a order of magnitude less fire-ey than the fires caused by the fuel in the car anyway. But DuPont can't patent that.

jonmurr:A propane-butane mix is less toxic, more effective as a refrigerant, and greener than any of this crap. Yes, there is a chance of a fireball, but this fireball would be a short poof more than a boom, and a order of magnitude less fire-ey than the fires caused by the fuel in the car anyway. But DuPont can't patent that.

Oldiron_79:Yeah in addition to being poisonous its also corrosive, an oxidiser, reacts with water, and is radioactive.I wouldnt touch the stuff with a 39&1/2 foot pole.

I passed a truckload of it on the interstate a few years back. I've seen plenty of trucks plackarded as "corrosive", "oxidizer", even a few with the "radioactive" tag -- but this was the first time I saw one that said "FISSILE".

I can't describe exactly how I felt sharing the interstate with that, but I will say that my idea of "safe and prudent speed" was suddenly quite a bit higher, and remained so until that truck vanished from my rear view.

reductive:Wow, fluorine sure has a bad reputation around here. The same reactivity and tiny atomic size that give rise to the hazards of fluorine gas and hydrofluoric acid also mean that many fluorochemical products are extremely stable. They're used as stain blockers in clothing, carpet, and upholstery applications. They're used to make o-rings for some applications with extreme conditions such as acidity or temperature. And of course everyone routinely enjoys their non-stick cookware which is literally coated in fluorochemicals (polytetrafluoroethylene).

And don't forget about a million different pharmaceuticals. I sometimes think biochemists working on medicines are all in a secret society, and have to put an "F" in every compound they make as part of their membership pact.

Of course, when you heat the crap out of most fluorochemicals, they break down and potentially liberate some hazardous products -- not only are F2 and HF hazardous, but hexafluoroacetone and perfluoroisobutylene have some crazy low exposure limits. Fortunately, an international automotive engineering society has investigated whether releasing this refrigerant into a car's engine compartment qualifies as heating the crap out of it:

Although the product is classified slightly flammable by ASHRAE, several years of testing by SAE proved that the product could not be ignited under conditions normally experienced by a vehicle.

And in abnormal conditions sufficient to ignite it, you might more wisely turn your attention to the GALLONS OF FARKING GASOLINE that are nearby.

DubtodaIll:Well really, a small percentage of the population certainly deserves to have their cars explode. What's a few charred corpses against the apparently and evident damage we've caused to mother nature?

mizchief:Makes sense, lets use chemicals that are actually deadly, to reduce the threat of something that is imaginary.

This has been the case with home HVAC for decades. Every few years DuPont convinces the EPA that their new refrigerant they they hold the patent for, is better for the environment, however they always require to be ran at higher pressures which means you have to buy new equipment to use it as well. Problem is that higher pressure is prone to more leaking, so even if the new cfc is better for the environment by volume than the old stuff, more of it gets released into the atmosphere. Seems to happen just as the patents on the old stuff are about to expire. Surely it's all about saving the environment and has nothing to do with the lobbying efforts.